On July 19th at
4pm Eastern ISCID hosted a live chat withRay Kurzweil,
Jay Richards, and William Dembski.View
the transcript here.

In the month of
July 2002 ISCID held an online discussion about the new book "Are
We Spiritual Machines?" which considers the revolutionary ideas
of Ray Kurzweil's version of strong A.I.
Starting July 1st and extending through July 28th, participants were
given a reading schedule and had the opportunity to engage several of
the book's contributors as well as ISCID fellows in an online discussion
forum.

In
“Are We Spiritual Machines?” critics of strong artificial intelligence
(the view that computers will go fully conscious) square off with one
of A.I.’s leading proponents, Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil says that nonbiological intelligence will soon become indistinguishable
from conscious entities such as humans. He explains how we will "reverse
engineer" our software (our minds) and "upgrade" our hardware (our bodies)
to indefinitely extend human life -- before the dawn of the 22nd century.
Kurzweil argues that accelerating growth of computer power will result
in machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence early in this century.
Nanobots will scan and enable the reverse engineering of our brains,
provide 3D immersive virtual realities, and free the human mind from
its severe physical limitations as the next step in evolution. Ultimately,
humankind will "merge with its computational technology."